Unable to send traces to opencensus collector from istio

I am unable to export spans from istio to a opencensus collector.

I have these services on my default namespace

NAME                       TYPE        CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                        AGE
backend                    ClusterIP   10.44.14.200   <none>        80/TCP,9464/TCP                18h
frontend                   ClusterIP   10.44.15.94    <none>        3000/TCP                       18h
kubernetes                 ClusterIP   10.44.0.1      <none>        443/TCP                        18h
middleware                 ClusterIP   10.44.15.251   <none>        80/TCP,9464/TCP                18h
opencensus-collector-svc   ClusterIP   10.44.7.194    <none>        14268/TCP,9411/TCP,55678/TCP   18h




NAME                                 READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
backend-prod-696889d9b9-rftrq        2/2       Running   0          22m
frontend-prod-c67d4498f-llf7k        2/2       Running   0          22m
**opencensus-collector--5f68669774-gf8ck       1/1       Running   0          58m << **
middleware-canary-75c449f7f7-gncfk   2/2       Running   0          4h4m
middleware-prod-6fbfdbdb9-zbqfv      2/2       Running   0          22m

All I was trying to do in the frontend code is use to send spans to the opencensus-collector-svc exposing port 55679 using these libraries

const opencensus = require("@opencensus/core");
const tracing = require("@opencensus/nodejs");
const propagation = require("@opencensus/propagation-b3");
const b3 = new propagation.B3Format();

The collector is also configured to export the receiving spans to jaeger backend.
But things do not seem to work.

frontend --> opencensus-collector-svc.default --> jaeger-collector.istio-system  

The above route does not work

Also I noticed that the following setup works okay

frontend --> jaeger-agent.istio-system --> jaeger-collector.istio-system

My question is, is it possible to send spans from istio envoy proxy to opencensus collector and later forward it to a backend of choice ?